On Sunday, February 23, 2020, the last part of the Wittstock series will be screened at the OWR Cineclub. The Wittstock series is a special film endeavour which follows – by means of seven films, during 20 years – the destinies of the female workers of a textile factory in Wittstock. After the screening the director Volker Koepp will hold a masterclass about what making this project implicated and about his documentary practice in general.
The Wittstock series started in 1975 with the short film
Madchen in Wittstock, which followed the way in which the professional life and the factory environment changed the young women of a rural area. What had started out as a common film documenting the life and work conditions of the Eastern-German proletariat, gradually turned into a series which catches in real time the political and social changes that the country went through, from the Communist regime, going through the unification of Germany until the first ten years of capitalism. Besides being a valuable historic document, these films affectionately create the picture of the destinies of three young women who grow up under our very eyes.
The last film of the series called
Wittstock, Wittstock, was released in 1997, though the closing of the textile factory was caught in the previous chapter. Volker Koepp decided to continue to follow the way in which
his protagonists adapted to the new economical order. With the help of some shootings and interviews made between 1974 and 1984, Koepp rebuilds the conditions of that recent past which had meant stability in work and then it focuses more than the previous episodes on the private lives of the three women who lost their jobs after the fall of the Communism. The film represents an opportunity for them to express their point of view on the so-called transition period, on the difficulty of not having a job and on the insecurity that the next day brought. All these feelings mirror perfectly the confusion that all the populations enveloped – including the Romanians – in the post-Communist period, when they found themselves brutally projected in an economical system that they didn`t master the rules of.
Volker Koepp was born in Poland in 1944 and the fact that he got formed at the same time with the big transformation of the post-war Europe influenced his work in a decisive way. After graduating the Technical University in Dresden and the Film Faculty of Potsdam-Babelsberg, he specializes in documentary film. His work splits in corpora of films connected between them by a space, an aesthetic intention or a common theme. One of his major projects focuses on the workers of the textile factory in Wittstock, a small town up north Berlin, that he followed for more than 20 years. Koepp associates his dedication with well defined aesthetical principles, such as refusing to use the explicative comment or using a pre-established scenario.
The access tickets to the Cineclub cost 10 RON/film and 5 RON/film for the pensioners, pupils, students, disabled people.
The tickets can be bought on the Eventbook platform, before the screening days or at the entrance, on the day of the screening.
The program for February 23, 2020
POINT
18.00
Wittstock, Wittstock
Germany, 1997
directed by Volker Koepp
117 minutes
the film has English subtitles
20.00
Q&A with Volker Koepp
